


Scavengers

by sternflammenden



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Crack Pairing, F/M, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-16
Updated: 2012-05-16
Packaged: 2017-11-05 11:14:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/405781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sternflammenden/pseuds/sternflammenden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt:  Barbrey/Petyr, we'll settle for each other and the ghosts inbetween us</p><p>Written for the asoiafkinkmeme on LiveJournal</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scavengers

“They’re all dead,” Barbrey murmurs as she reclines on her borrowed bed. She runs her hands through her hair and looses it from its topknot, shivering as it falls over her shoulders. There is a half-drunk glass, no a bottle, of wine on the table beside her, and she thinks that before the evening is over, she’d like to make quick work of it. It’s nothing like what she would have had before the war, when they’d paraded through ransacked Winterfell, and it’s a good deal poorer than her father’s cellars, but she won’t think on it.

Father is dead. Winterfell is ashes, a lichyard for fallen fools and usurpers.

 _But the tombs_ – but the tombs fade away as she drinks deeply, draining her glass, and Brandon’s laughter, always in the back of her mind when she is alone with this curious man, this Littlefinger, as Roose and Manderly had called him, disdain showing in their scornful tones, dissipates.

 _He can’t be so great a fool_ , Barbrey thinks, peering at him, noticing as if for the first time the ironic lilt to his mouth, the careful cut of his beard, his overly-elegant dress, all of it so out of place here in the cloisters of the Eyrie. _After all, he’s survived and they are naught but bones now._

She grins then.

And Petyr beholds the Widow Dustin, the Lady of Barrowton, her face far too narrow and harsh, her mouth cruel yet vulnerable when she’s drunk far too much, and he realizes that she’s not beautiful, she’s not pleasing, she’s perhaps more than a little dangerous. There is nothing of pinkened southron skies and mild breezes in her, only the harsh wind and frozen ground, the unfertile coldness of the north. He’s in his cups too, or at least he pretends to be, for how else to justify the fact that she’s on his bed, her eyes hazy yet fixed upon him? How else to tell himself that she is here for more than vengeance, after her alliances have all fallen? That she does not see the space, or lack thereof, between him and his Alayne?

She is not Cat. She is not even Lysa. She is too clever by far, her heart too hardened.

But none of it matters tonight. She pulls him down to the bed, hands wrestling his finery from his slight form, fingers and nails grazing his chest, lips and teeth meeting his mouth. Barbrey, he thinks, although he would never breach that intimacy, would never call her anything but Lady this or Lady that, and as he fumbles at his breeches, fingers deadened by the drink, she slaps his hand away, impatient. There is no eagerness in her gestures, merely a want that speaks of long years of settling, of denial, of self-delusion. Her slender body engulfs his, her legs wrapped around his waist, thumbs pressing against his collarbone as he enters her, as he begins to go through the motions.

It’s as if she will devour him, as he imagined that she devoured the north. In the end, they are scavengers, fellow crows, feasting on the corpses of their lessers.

When Barbrey’s mouth closes on his shoulder, Petyr cries out, but thinks in the back of his mind, _How fitting._


End file.
